Beck 🦋

@ffruitsy.bsky.social

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he/they 24 • animation 🌙 art and character design • 🎨 • human made • ARG maker • no AI 🍄🍃• 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 dm for commissions forever, my love 💕➡️ @death-cafe.bsky.social

"I am interested in the transitory state,"
Huyghe has said, "in the in-between." Blurring boundaries between human imagination, artificial intelligence, data, and physical matter, “Mind's Eye (L)” resulted from a sequence of translations. First, the artist prompted a human collaborator to visualize certain objects or ideas while recording their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Next, a generative adversarial network (GAN), a form of machine learning that draws from vast image databases, helped reconstruct this brain activity in three dimensions. Composed from synthetic and biological material, Mind's Eye (L) slowly transforms and decays, which means the work is ever in flux.

Simultaneously provocative, humorous, and disturbing, Tala Madani's paintings, drawings, and stop-motion animations create alternate realities that have surprising parallels with our own. Born and raised in Tehran and based in Los Angeles, Madani makes work that offers a critical lens through which to consider themes such as patriarchy and xenophobia, informed by the sociopolitical contexts of Iran and the United States but specific to neither. Political cartoons and medieval art are among her references.

This installation comprises five of the artist's early stop-motion animations. They are populated by bald, middle-aged men who face humiliating and violent setbacks. To create a single minute of video, Madani paints almost 2,500 images in sequence on a single canvas or piece of wood, recording the process with a camera, frame by frame. Brief in length and looped, the videos endlessly cycle through moments of hope and abjection, underscoring their existential and absurdist themes.

For this work, the artist recreated German naturalist and explorer Alexander von
Humboldt's 1801 journey through the northern Andes. Restrepo's video-sculpture shows footage of his own ascent, by foot, of the legendary Quindio Pass in Colombia, known for its technical difficulty and ecological diversity.

By retracing Humboldt's path, the artist confronted the notion of "discovery" that has historically defined representations of the American landscape. In doing so, he added "another layer in the back-and-forth of interpretations and subjectivities around the representation of place," Restrepo explained.

In 1992, Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña toured the United States, Spain, England, and Australia as representatives of the fictional, "undiscovered" island of Guatinaui. Confined within a gilded cage, the duo performed made-up "traditional tasks," such as lifting weights and watching television. Although the performance was intended as a satirical reenactment of ethnographic exhibitions of humans—a practice that reached its peak during nineteenth-century world's fairs-many viewers believed they were real captives.
Viewer responses, documented in this film, ranged from debates over the performance's authenticity to calls to the Humane Society.

Fusco later recorded some of the responses as engravings (also on view here), which reference early forms of mass media that popularized images of exoticized "others.”

Between 1997 and 1998, Bacher installed a closed-circuit video camera in the office of Pat Hearn, a gallerist who helped cultivate downtown New York's thriving art scene. The camera transmitted a live feed of Hearn's daily activities to a monitor in her gallery. At the time, she was undergoing treatment for cancer. After Hearn's death in 2000, Bacher used thousands of stills from the footage to assemble a collage of stop-motion sequences.

With this work, Bacher used animation to create an "illusion of life" that both memorializes a colleague and friend and captures the instability of our perceptions of time.

Donut from 2021